best things to remove for a gaming machine?

[redmanmark86]

hi there, i was wondering if someone could give me some advice on the best things to remove from my XP Pro SP 2 cd to use my machine for gaming, general internet browsing, dvd burning and well office, that pretty much covers it

any help appreciated thanks

[toastiez]

well, broadly....just remove unnecessary drivers and programs. Do you need Windows Media player? Do you need Internet Explorer? (You can use Firefox instead). Don't remove the IE core, lots of stuff relies on it. Do you need Windows Update (with a Firewall and good Anti-Virus, you probably would be fine). Just remove anything you think you won't need. You could remove joystick drivers if you won't be using one (you can download them later). You probably don't need IIS. You could remove some of the wizards.

It's not hard to choose what you won't need. I've gotten my installation to 300.21MB and it has Firefox, VLC Media player, uTorrent, Office 2003, the IE core, IE7, WinRAR, 7zip, notepad2, notepad++, AVG, spybot, xfire, Gaim, and Windows Media Player. I didn't remove Paint, notepad, or Calculator. Good luck

Edited October 22, 2006 by toastiez

[redmanmark86]

ok i really dont know how you got it that small, i got it down to 330mb and thats with Media Player 11, Direct 9.0c, the Post SP2 hot fix thing, Winrar and U torrent...

i really dnt know how you got it so tiny but then i was scared to take out somethings cuz i didnt know if they would affact my system or not

i have two drivers i would like to put in but i dont know how, thats my belkin wireless USB drivers and my ATI catalyst ones, any ideas how you go about it cuz they both got their own mini contorl type things and .exes

and honestly how did u get ur install so tiny cuz my drema is to get XP small enough on the first install so it doesn't use more then 100mb RAM

[bledd]

use winamp lite and media player classic

loads smaller and better than WMP

just do a few test installs, if you've used nlite a few times, then start becoming really heavy handed with the removals, if you know how to assign an ip address, then you can remove DHCP and i think all the networking options..

get a 2nd hard drive or partition for fast testing

[albator]

100 meg of ram ! How can you use as much ?

if you got it down to 330mb, you should have missed a lot of things. you could do a 150mb build with no problem.

[Jeremy]

I've been at this for years and over that time I've wised up about many things.

If you want to have great gaming, the answer is not to remove everything with nLite, it's to upgrade your hardware. Take a 300GB drive and make a 300MB file on it. Is your performance going to degrade at all with that 300MB sitting there? Of course not. The same thing goes for 300MBs of Windows files sitting there. Use a good defragmenter (I use Diskeeper since it does it automatically in the background with unused system resources so it doesn't bother your performance). Use CCleaner to clean out junk/cache/temp files. Disable/set to manual the Services you don't need running, as well as your start-up list. If you're gaming, make sure it's the only thing your PC is worrying about when you're doing it.

When using nLite, the most space is actually taken up by the Languages section, remove Drivers, Accessories, Languages, Keyboard Layouts, and maybe IE, OE, WMP. Other than that, leave it alone.

Cheers.

[Halogen]

Try using Server 2003, it's been known to do wonders (with gaming and everything).

Just remove all the server stuff and turn on all the video hardware acceleration. There are also some conversion tools and tweaks floating around.

[redmanmark86]

thanks for the suggestions, i still dont know how you guys got it down to 150mb but i think i got an ideal slip streamed one, just going to give it ago now and see how it works out,

out of wonder, anybody know with media center XP Keys work with Windows XP Pro discs...